Penzer's report on eunuchs in the Turkish harem

The British scholar Norman Mosley Penzer was afforded a rare personal tour of the Turkish palace known as the Grand Seraglio. His 1936 book, "The Harem", provides long descriptions of the palace's layout with some black-and-white photographs of the building, and is also notable for its historical description of the eunuch servants during the time of the sultans.

By the time of Penzer's study in the early twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire had already fallen, yet the palace's secrecy was still guarded. He complained that "there has always been the greatest difficulty in obtaining photographs, and in the 1933 guide-book it is very definitely stated more than once that no cameras are allowed past the entrance gate, and no photographs whatever may be taken." He did, however, manage to take photographs from a parapet on the Divan Tower.

Penzer's chapter "Previous Accounts of the Seraglio" credits the work of travelers Nicolas de Nicolay (1551), Domenico Hierosolimitano (1580s), Thomas Dallam (1599), Ottaviano Bon (1604-7), Edmund Chishull (1701), Aubry de la Motraye (1699-1714) and Jean-Claude Flachat (1740-55).

Most of the information on eunuchs is consolidated in a chapter called "The Black Eunuchs." He found only these source works "entirely devoted" to eunuchs: "Eunuchi Nati, Facti, Mystici" by Joannes Heribertus (1655); "Eunuchi Conjugium" by Hieronymus Delphinus (1666); "Eunuchism Display'd" by Charles Ancillon (1707); and "Les Eunuques À Travers Les Âges" by Richard Millant (1908).

Here he mentions a colleague, E. D. Cumming, who had a work in progress. Edward Dilworth Cumming was born in 1901 to Lucy Kittredge and the law professor George Miller Cumming who were both from prominent families. He grew up on the outskirts of New York City. He attended Harvard University for one year and Columbia University for a year and a half, after which he was inconsistently employed with private schools and an engineering firm. (He did not, as Penzer assumed, have a doctoral degree. It seems that Penzer knew him only slightly through mail correspondence.) Although he was well traveled, he primarily lived at home with his parents and sister, and he died by suicide at age 39 without ever having completed or published his manuscript. The manuscript was donated to the New York Academy of Medicine in 1943, and today, it can be accessed in NYAM's rare books collection as 19 loose-leaf binders of handwritten pages, plus numerous small boxes of hand-copied quotations from over 1200 sources, mainly in English, French, and German.

Penzer mentions the work of another colleague, "The Eunuch in Society," by H. R. M. Chamberlain. Penzer previously named this 1927 work in his notes on "The Ocean of Story", and he indicated in "The Harem" that, as of 1936, he believed it had not yet been published. The author was Herbert Roy Maslen Chamberlain (known as "Roy"), an officer in the First World War, a graduate of the London School of Economics, a university lecturer, and an avid stamp collector who was about the same age as Penzer. The manuscript was privately printed shortly before the author ceased his studies at LSE. It appears that LSE never received the anticipated copy of Chamberlain's masters thesis on the slave trade (nor did they give him the masters degree), and today, they do not have a copy of "The Eunuch in Society," either. Chamberlain did not have children and died in 1961. He left his personal effects to his second wife, who died without leaving a will. The volumes in Penzer's personal library might have been sold through Charles J. Sawyer Books in London, with which he had a publishing relationship and which sold his personal correspondence a decade after his death, but the last proprietor of that family business died in 2012. The manuscript is therefore lost.

Other citations include A. H. Lybyer's "The Government of the Ottoman Empire in the Time of Suleiman the Magnificent" (1913) and Barnette Miller's "Beyond the Sublime Porte" (1931).

Penzer's history suggests (following the historian Ammianus Marcellinus) that the Assyrian queen Sammuramat, mythologized as "Semiramis," was one of the earliest royals to employ eunuchs during her rule from 811-808 BCE. The Persian king Cyrus, who conquered Babylon in 538 BCE, also had eunuch servants.

The Roman emperor Domitian's ban on eunuchs in the first century did not prevent their subsequent popularity in the Byzantine empire. While Constantinople was under Byzantine rule, the system of keeping women veiled and secluded in a palace guarded by eunuchs thrived. By the time the city was conquered in 1453 by the Turks, the Turks embraced these customs, too, despite the Koran's ban on eunuchs. The eunuchs had their own mosque, "built after the great fire of 1665 and containing much fine faience work with interesting marble tablets recording gifts of various eunuchs towards the upkeep and beautifying of the rooms."

The Turks used white eunuchs from Georgia and Circassia in the early 15th century and added black eunuchs from Abyssinia and Sudan in the late 15th century. These servants were segregated: "No white eunuchs are allowed to visit their black brethren in any circumstances whatever."

Penzer expresses his revulsion of this gender. He refers to eunuchs as "unproductive, sterile, unnatural, and altogether unwholesome member[s] of society." While they were once a "necessary evil" to keep up the harem, in modern times they are no longer needed and "alone they seem rightly to belong" within the pages of "Arabian Nights" fairy tales. He managed to meet only "two, or possibly three, of these strange beings" while in Turkey.

In a very strange paragraph, he describes their lack of body hair, "feminine" voices, excess weight, wrinkled skin, eye and bladder weakness, and memory and sleep problems, to which he adds odd stereotypes including a fondness for sweets, the color red, and African drums, an intolerance and "no liking" for alcohol, and greedy natures. His racist conclusion: "They unite the small brain of the negro with the childish imagination of the ignorant Oriental. Consequently they believe the wildest stories, and once an idea has entered their minds nothing can change it."

Two passages in the book contradict this paragraph: First, Tavernier's report that alcohol was often smuggled in as a bribe for eunuchs, whereas Penzer says elsewhere that alcohol was distasteful to them, and second, another writer's claim that the white eunuchs were "like mummified old women...for the most part, very thin and shrivelled," whereas Penzer said elsewhere that the eunuchs were obese. Penzer does not seem aware of these contradictions in his reporting.

In subsequent pages, outside of the chapter on the black eunuchs, Penzer tells how the seventeeth-century Sultan Ibrahim drowned his entire harem so that he could entertain himself by getting a new one, and in such situations the Kislar Agha (the chief black eunuch) was typically the overseer of the execution process, handing the condemned women over to the Bostanji-bashi (head gardener) who would tie them in sacks and row them to open water. He also retells a story reported by Paul Rycaut in which Sultan Ibrahim adored the Kislar Agha's adopted infant son, born of a supposed virgin the Kislar Agha had purchased who proved to be already pregnant. Ibrahim's interest in the child caused tension with the mother of Ibrahim's biological infant son. The Kislar Agha attempted to retire quietly to Egypt, via a pilgrimage to Mecca, to avoid the family conflict, but was killed on his ship by the Maltese. Ibrahim took revenge on Malta. It turned into a twenty-year war – all precipitated by the eunuch's adoption of a child!

Penzer ends with Flachat's report of how the Sultan would throw a handkerchief at the harem girl he most desired that night and the Kislar Agha would facilitate private time for them. Although much of Penzer's information is drawn from the reports of other travelers, this accessible book has had a wide cultural influence on others writing about the eunuchs in the Turkish harem.

Originally posted to Helium Network on Feb. 19, 2012.

Also, if you are interested in castrated villains in fiction, please check out Painting Dragons: What Storytellers Need to Know About Writing Eunuch Villains. If you are interested in the Western literary treatment of castration in history, please check out Ten Past Noon: Focus and Fate at Forty. Both are by Tucker Lieberman.

Imagining Esther's 'sister wife'

Roseanna M. White's novel Jewel of Persia retells the famous Biblical story celebrated as the basis of the Jewish holiday Purim. According to the Bible's Book of Esther, while the Jews lived under Ahasuerus (believed by most scholars to be the Persian King Xerxes who reigned in the fifth century BCE), the king exiled his wife Vashti for displeasing him, and he held a beauty contest to select a new queen. He chose Esther, who, unbeknownst to him, was Jewish. Subsequently, the king was persuaded by his advisor Haman to allow the extermination of all the Jews in Persia. When Esther learned of it, she informed the king that she and her cousin Mordecai, who had once saved the king's life by reporting an assassination plot, were Jewish and would be threatened by the edict. The king immediately hanged Haman and promoted Mordecai, and the edict against the Jews was canceled.

White's elaboration of this tale creates an additional character, a poor Jewish woman, Kasia, discovered by the king to be a great beauty. She follows the banished queen Vashti (called by her Persian name Amestris in this story) and precedes her friend Esther, who of course eventually also becomes the king's wife. Among all of King Xerxes' wives and concubines, Kasia is his great love – and he knows from the beginning that she is Jewish. She and two other concubines are chosen to accompany Xerxes on his military campaigns against Greece.

White's imaginative narrative remains faithful to the basic ideas in the Biblical version. Her afterword indicates that she also took many historical details from Herodotus' Histories. If Haman is a two-dimensional anti-Semite not given much psychological depth, it is compensated for by the focus placed on the romantic longings of women. White's website indicates that she and her husband run the Christian Review of Books and that she is active in her Baptist church. That said, the story about Jews in Persia feels composed from a distinctly modern, American, Christian perspective.

One could argue that this is really a story about prayer. The interpersonal conflict between Kasia and Xerxes tends to center on their religious disagreements. Xerxes would prefer that his wife conform to the Zoroastrian worship of Ahura Mazda, but Kasia is a devout Jew, praying several times a day and insisting that she will always identify with the people from whom she came.

The problem is that the author doesn't seem to grasp what observance of Jewish custom involves. Never once do any of the Jewish characters mention dietary laws or Sabbath observance, issues that would surely arise for them inside the Persian palace. Furthermore, the language of their prayer feels distinctly of the American evangelical style. As the author describes one of Mordecai's religious experiences: "...he put one foot onto his street and halted. His spirit weighed heavy within him, blurring his vision and stealing his breath. 'Jehovah?' he whispered." She then has him continue to ask: "'What is it, Lord?'" This sort of conversational prayer occurs many times throughout the book. The idea of having an intimate, "personal" relationship with God is culturally more Protestant Christian than Jewish. Traditionally, Jews do not even pronounce aloud the name of God spelled "YHVH" in Hebrew. Toward the end of the story, when Esther petitions for the lives of the Jews, the author writes, "The Spirit settled over her." This undefined "Spirit" sounds like a concept from the Christian trinity; it isn't clear what it would correspond to in Jewish theology.

So, it is a story about prayer, but written more for Christians than for Jews.

Another oddity is the obviously deliberate omission of any reference to physical sexual expression. This is a love story set in a harem. It's about a powerful man who owns multiple women, taking them from their families when they are little more than girls, using their bodies to produce male heirs, and competing with his male relatives for dominance over them. Yet the author describes nothing more than the occasional chaste kiss or angry pinch on the arm. If more needs to be implied, the narrative cuts off and resumes the next morning.

Presumably, this editorial decision is driven by the author's religious beliefs. Unfortunately, it doesn't work. Love stories set in harems are inherently not G-rated and cannot be made so by modern American standards without abandoning much of the stories' cultural contexts. It would be one thing to minimize the amount of erotic and sexually violent scenes, but to completely eschew language for relevant body parts and reproductive functions is to drastically limit the story. The genteel reader can only infer so much. One cannot infer what isn't there to be inferred. Neither is the reader ever given a precise count of Xerxes' many wives and concubines, another detail that would have grounded the novel's sentiment in a harder reality.

Lastly, the treatment of eunuch characters is a little strange. The Book of Esther states that the king was served by seven named eunuchs; an additional eunuch later plots the king's demise. Accordingly, White writes, "Xerxes nodded at the eunuch nearest the door, who motioned his advisers into the room. The seven of them filed in, the men of soundest wisdom and highest birth below the princes. Most of them had advised his father before him." Kasia's servant Theron, like Kasia herself, is fictional, but others use the Biblical names assigned to these eunuchs.

The eunuchs, who are alternately referred to as "slaves," are always present. They are given relatively small orders that can be executed quickly: sending messages, fetching people, setting up thrones. None of the orders are ever of a managerial, organizational, or creative nature. Furthermore, the eunuchs are not given personal histories. The reader is never told what race they are, where they came from, why they were castrated, what they looked like, where they slept, who they loved, or who they worshipped. Frequently, such a slave appears as "a eunuch" without having any name designated at all, as if he is interchangeable with others like him, existing only to announce the presence of more important characters.

They are rarely depicted as having feelings or opinions of their own – although there is the occasional clenched fist when they are forced to bite their tongues – and so they do not serve as confidants to the king or queens. When Darius plans to seduce Kasia, Theron warns, "Mistress, no," in a "muted" voice and then, because she does not heed his warning, he has to rush to her aid. Kasia laments Darius's reprehensible behavior, thinking to herself, "She had just lost the one friend she had left in her husband's house." What is the eunuch walking her home with his arm around her? Chopped liver? The only arguable demonstration of a eunuch's personal opinion occurs when the banished queen Amestris orders her head eunuch to choose a trusted servant to arrange for Xerxes' assassination. Corresponding to the Biblical, the author has Teresh argue: "Do you know how many of my brothers died in his pointless war, Bigthan? Four. All four dead, and me castrated to serve at his blasted door. My father's name will die now." After Mordecai overhears and reports this grumbling, the reader is told that Amestris' servant is no more; it is not even made explicit that there was an execution of a eunuch or two. It is important to realize that these words did not necessarily represent Teresh's actual opinion. He spoke only because he was ordered to do so by two levels of management.

In this story, eunuchs always obey, without exception. Thus Xerxes is able to order his servants not to follow him, "knowing they would obey whether they liked it or not". This creates problems for them, given that loyalties can conflict and that it is not possible to make everyone happy all the time. A particular eunuch believes he can defend a particular woman against "any other man" except the crown prince; even if the future king injures her, "it would have been death to the slave if he raised a hand to stop him." In other words, if two of a eunuch's superiors fight, the eunuch is damned if he intervenes and damned if he doesn't. When one's job is simply to follow orders, there are few points awarded for righteousness.

In short, there are limitations to this novel. It is nonetheless imaginative and well-meaning in its description of an interfaith marriage that changed the destiny of the Jews.

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Esther Brownsmith writes:

"...literacy was likely an elite privilege in the ancient world—one that frequently excluded marginalized genders. But while concrete evidence for female or queer authorship of early Jewish texts is scant, these texts did reflect a different embodied and marginalized identity: Jewish identity. Whether they lived in diaspora or in a strip of Levantine land controlled by a string of foreign empires, Jews wrote from the margins of ancient Mediterranean and West Asian culture."

* * *

"...fan fiction can provide a crucial model and lens for reading biblical and parabiblical texts...in my upcoming monograph, Queen of the Alternate Universe: The Book of Esther as Fan Fiction, I focus on this process as it manifests in the book of Esther. ...the book of Esther reflect[s] on Mesopotamian deities— Ishtar/Esther and Marduk/Mordecai—through a diasporic Jewish lens. ...[it has a] fusion of mythic characters with a minoritized culture, using a familiar genre."

* * *

"Esther and Mordecai engage in an impassioned conversation, but they never actually see each other; every message is communicated back and forth by Hathach, a eunuch who serves Esther. Nevertheless, their communications are physically embodied; Esther sends Mordecai new clothing, and in response, Mordecai sends back a written copy of Haman’s decree. Esther counters by referring to her absence of physical contact with the king, and when Mordecai convinces her to act anyway, she instructs him and all the Jews of the city to fast for three days in preparation—once again a bodily action, whether or not there was implicit prayer accompanying it. In short, Mordecai and Esther are participating in this conversation from a fully embodied perspective, even as they speak to each other from entirely different spaces."

* * *

"the comparison with fan fiction gives us a possible motive for why the ancient Jewish author would choose to write a Jewish story whose central characters are borrowed from Mesopotamian culture. The authors that Kelley examines are engaged in emotioned literacy: the process of writing that stems from their emotional and bodily identity, including their deep love for the source material. But as fan fiction scholars have said from the beginning, love is not the only emotion that fuels fan fiction authorship. For instance, Henry Jenkins described the dueling emotions of “fascination” and “frustration,” noting that frustration is what often fuels authors to go in and write a new text, instead of simply rereading an old one. Those fan authors thus become “active participants in the construction and circulation of textual meanings.” (2013, 24) The corpus of Mesopotamian literature about Ishtar and Marduk was broad and pervasive; just as Israelite biblical texts reimagined Canaanite myths like the triumph over the chaotic sea, so did the author of Esther reimagine the Mesopotamian characters of their broader social sphere."

* * *

"...the book of Esther use[s] transformation through supplementation to rewrite the ubiquitous Mesopotamian characters of Ishtar and Marduk, shifting them into a context of Jewish identity."

— “I Wrote My Way Out”: Embodied Appropriation, Fan Fiction, and the Book of Esther
Esther Brownsmith, University of Dayton
BOOKS & CULTURE VOLUME 19, NUMBER 1-2, 2023 1

This article was originally posted to Helium Network on Sept. 1, 2012.

Image: A Purim spiel (a staged pageant of the story of Esther) photographed circa 1869 by Julia Margaret Cameron. © No known copyright restrictions. Belongs to the UK`s National Media Museum. Flickr.

The character of 'The Eunuch Neferu'

The Eunuch Neferu, originally self-published by Daniel Tegan Marsche in 2002, is an unusual novel about a young eunuch in Egypt in the first century BCE.

Admired for his beauty by a Roman general who was passing through the desert, Neferu was taken from his family of poor farmers and brought to the general's estate in the city of Alexandria to be a sexual servant. His drunkard father had willingly sold him to the general to pay for his gambling losses. Neferu was only eleven, had no sexual awareness, and did not understand the implications of the castration that would be required by the general. He only knew that he was duly impressed at being treated as a guest of honor at a residence that was to him unimaginably lavish. An older eunuch servant, Bo'am, briefly tutored him on sexual subjects so that he could express consent to be castrated.

Rather than undergoing the traditional Egyptian procedure which would have involved being buried in the hot desert sand for days, this boy had the good fortune to be brought to a surgeon who tied him to a chair and drugged him with dark brown opium powder mixed with honey. His mentor Bo'am told him he would feel no pain, but of course he did, despite the painkiller, when he awoke. He hazily dreamed of stepping onto a swimming crocodile's back and imagined himself delivered by a crowd of people who honored him with a new name. Later, recalling the agony of his recovery, he was nevertheless grateful he had not received the more primitive surgery with the higher mortality rate.

With respect to his initial innocence of sex, Neferu seems credible as an eleven-year-old, but in most other respects, including his poise, eloquence and understandings of the subtle machinations of adults, his first-person narrative seems to come from a psyche that is at least sixteen. He does seem to attain that chronological age, too, over the course of the book.

There are other oddities about this story. The very title is an anachronism. The name Neferu was given to the boy eunuch - originally known as Kebryn - by the general, halfway through the book, who says it means "the beauty of heaven." The idea is that it combines the Coptic word "nefer" meaning beauty and the Greek word "utopia" meaning heaven. Unfortunately, the word "utopia," literally meaning "nowhere," was actually coined by the English writer Thomas More over a millennium and a half after this story was supposed to have taken place. Other distracting anachronisms occasionally appear in the text such as the use of the Freudian phrase "anally retentive" and the unexplained use of Sanskrit terms for eunuch including primarily "hijras" and "vadhri" and also "prakrti," "pota," and "sandha." Sanskrit was spoken in India.

There is never an explanation of why the general required his sexual slave to be castrated, particularly as his previous lover had not been castrated and as he intended to leave his entire estate to the eunuch anyway. Nor is there an examination of how Neferu was affected by his castration. In the many homoerotic scenes, there is no mention of his castration negatively affecting his physical drive, pleasure or expectations, and instead there is one positive mention of his "ever so sensitive" scar. He never questions whether he would have liked to be able to father children. Conveniently for him, he is exclusively interested in men; there are no significant female characters in the book, anyway.

The author's biography on Amazon.com calls the story "a cathartic recounting of Marsche's personal, childhood journey of abuse re-wound to a place and time where his emotions could be expressed without contempt." Writing in the first person, he clarifies: "I was not a sexual being as a child, I was used as a sexual object; there is a huge difference." It is unclear why writing about an eleven-year-old whose sexuality is quickly awakened by a much older man was cathartic for Marsche. The eunuch in this story, despite his castration and domination by a Roman general, is extremely sexual. Marsche asserts in this same biography that "there is life after the abuse," an idea distinctly not suggested by the novel's abrupt, dark ending.

This review refers to the first edition published through iUniverse, but a fourth revision has been made available. The author is currently known as Daniel Malloy Smith according to GoodReads. His tale may have been inspired by Mary Renault's The Persian Boy (1972) or Wilbur Smith's River God (1993).

Buy the fourth edition of The Eunuch Neferu:

Neferu's status - slave or free? - is a subject of much contemplation. He seems to be fascinated by his condition of being technically able to leave the general but having no fathomable reason to do so. He wants to wear silk and gold and eat anachronistic foods; this he is able to do. His status with the general is gradually elevated until they are nearly peers. Bo'am consistently reminds him of his good fortune with purrs such as "I know many an indentured eunuch that would have glorified in the liberation to utter such words as your own."

Education is not a large motivator for him. He is told he must learn Latin and Greek in addition to his native Egyptian and Hebrew, but never mentions his studies, apart from how his dancing, which he seems to find somewhat tiresome, successfully impresses his lover.

Initially, Neferu prays to various Egyptian gods, but this habit seems to drop off the longer he lives in luxury. While Neferu is struck by temporary blindness, the Oracle of Bastet, addressing him as "Sightless Pilgrim," advises him to pick an Egyptian god and devote himself to it. Although this would seem to be an important warning, Neferu seemingly forgets this advice and the theme is never mentioned again.

As he is not motivated by ambition, education, religion, family (there is barely any passing mention of the parents he left), or general concern for others' welfare, he seems motivated primarily by appreciation for finery and sex and to some degree by the drive to maintain his honor. The insight he gains during his brief blindness represents a minute increase especially for a young man who should be growing psychologically in leaps and bounds. Finally, for all his apparent exploitation and tender age, he does not display the expected level of psychic vulnerability and therefore isn't even properly pitiable. Thus his fictional existence leaves a limited legacy.

Learning about books without having to read them

No one can ever read all the books there are. Can a book be discussed intelligently, without shame, by someone who has not read it? This article was originally posted to Helium Network on Dec. 25, 2012.

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Please note: I have a more recent article on this same book: "We are the book we're talking about," May 29, 2022.

Oliver Traldi wrote "Nobody Reads," Arc Digital (Medium), Dec 31, 2020.

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At first blush, literature professor Pierre Bayard's title "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read" threatens to be a confessional that could have the foreseeable consequence — for the author — of a swift professional termination. Anyone who talks about this book as if it were a confessional, however, clearly hasn't read the book, and worse, as Bayard would have it, doesn't understand the function served by the book.

Bayard has produced a nuanced thesis arguing that it is more important to understand a book's cultural role than it is to actually have handled the book and read it cover-to-cover. Evidently speaking to literature professors and students, he examines with good humor the incorrect assumption that all of one's colleagues have read all the canonical books and that one must strive to match their prolificacy and infallible memories, while detailing the numerous occasions that a professed devotee of literature (or just a cocktail party guest) might be called to discourse upon a book they haven't read.

The shame of not reading

Bayard writes:

"As long as we strive for an image of cultural literacy that only serves to disguise us from others and ourselves, our more or less unconscious shame about the real nature of our interaction with books"

— here, he addresses those people who feel inadequacy when acknowledging the books they haven't read, a condition that may or may not afflict all human beings —

"will weigh on all our interactions with them and everything else we say about them...we need to recognize this shame and analyze its foundations. Only in doing so can we hope to survive the avalanche of fragments of books that threatens to engulf us in the face of which our deepest identity is revealed to be in permanent danger."

Bayard's candid admissions of the gaps in his reading history is good comic fodder. He cites many titles throughout his text, along with indication of whether he has actually read them and whether he has a good opinion of them. 

Whether his argument will be accepted by most people is another matter. It will probably be more appealing to people who are best described as "those who recognize the importance of books" rather than "lovers of literature."

'Non-reading'

In Bayard's view, what he calls "non-reading" is even more important than reading. The number of books available is pragmatically infinite. To spend time reading one is to choose to forego all the others. Furthermore, once read, a book has a shelf-life in the mind, so it is eventually forgotten. From the perspective of gaining lasting knowledge or professional prestige (he does not consider the mere entertainment value of an afternoon spent reading), it is more effective to engage in a targeted sort of "non-reading," that is, identifying which books are culturally significant, learning about them and perhaps skimming through them, and thus making them part of one's own repertoire of books that can be discussed in educated company.

'Collective', 'inner' and 'virtual' libraries

He proposes the idea of three kinds of "libraries," a word representing inventories of known books. The first is a shared cultural or "collective library," that is, an ostensible agreement about what books are significant. Beyond that, each person has an individual "inner library" of books that are significant and known to them. Lastly, there is a "virtual library," an ad hoc creation when two individuals bump libraries and exchange knowledge and opinions.

He describes it as a

"realm in which books are discussed, in either written or oral form, with other people. It is a mobile sector of every culture's collective library and is located at the point of intersection of the various 'inner libraries' of each participant in the discussion. It is subject to a number of rules, whose goal is to maintain it as a consensual space in which books are replaced by 'fictions' of books."

Why "'fictions' of books"? Because people generally only discuss their personal understandings of books, and especially when they haven't read the book in question, their understanding is likely to be a creative invention.

Discussing a book while knowing very little about it

As long as someone is provided with the barest details of a book, they can begin to speak about it. As Bayard sees it, these opinions are valid, and in fact might even be "privileged" because their naïveté and freshness allows them to challenge a book's fundamental assumptions. (Considering Hamlet as an example, actual non-readers with the double privilege of being cultural outsiders have asked whether the queen's remarriage is indeed too hasty rather than too slow, how the characters are related along genealogical lines that are not defined within the text, and just what a "ghost" is.) In most cases, he claims, spending time reading a book cover-to-cover will not fundamentally change one's prejudicial opinion of it, and therefore — here he makes a more controversial claim — it isn't so important that one take the time to perform a thorough reading, where skimming, mentally cataloguing, and discussing the book might be a workable substitute.

Even when both people discussing the book have actually read at least part of it, "the discussion is less about the book itself than about a fragmentary and reconstituted object." This doesn't matter, he says, since any given book chiefly "serves as a kind of temporary shimmering prism through which we see the whole" system of books. To be less florid about it, a book's title and author are often merely a jumping-off point for discussion about the meaning of life. Minimally, participants need to be able to navigate to that jumping-off point (i.e. recognize the book's title) and chime in, and the discussion will quickly veer to subjects they can better commandeer.

Getting the point

The central point of "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read" is repeated perhaps too many times, but generally to a pleasant effect, for which partial credit must go to translator Jeffrey Mehlman. One of the many expressions of the thesis runs as follows:

"Being cultivated is a matter not of having read any book in particular, but of being able to find your bearings within books as a system — which requires you to know that they form a system and to be able to locate each element in relation to the others."

Someone who chooses to "non-read" this book by skimming it will probably succeed in absorbing its point and, in so doing, may feel vindicated.

Image: Marie Wegman of Fort Wayne Daisies, All American Girls Prof. Baseball League, and umpire Norris Ward Photographed on April 22, 1948. © State Library and Archives of Florida. No known copyright restrictions. Flickr.

Why people publish ‘tell-all’ stories in books and on social media

Some people write confessional memoirs that reveal infidelity, drug use or violence. What motivates people to write these potentially embarrassing stories? Is there benefit?

Confessional memoirs probably had more shock value in previous decades. Today, it is no longer only celebrities or embattled souls who feel driven to share lurid tales or to reveal how they have compromised their ideals or fallen short. Moreover, the promise of redemption, or at least a large paycheck, is no longer required to elicit these stories. Today, ordinary people voluntarily broadcast their personal history on the Internet without compensation.

Of course more effort goes into writing a book than a Facebook post, so there may be different motivations behind writing a book. Yet there is meaning in the allegory that "Facebook is the novel we are all writing," as Katie Roiphe put it. There is a way in which the collective attitude that favors and participates in revealing personal details online helps construct a definition of the self, just as a novel through its narrative presents an interpretation of the self.

Some examples of confessional memoir

A couple of the more recent titles were pointed out by Julia Baird in "Our era of dirty laundry" (Newsweek, March 8, 2010):

"When we joke that Elin Nordegren attacked her husband Tiger Woods with a golf club, when Elizabeth Edwards writes books about resilience, or when Jenny Sanford publishes a memoir confirming that her husband is indeed a self-involved cad (and tightwad), we cheer and roar. No more little woman on the sidelines!"

In a slightly different genre, Wendy Plump wrote a memoir of infidelities committed by both herself and her husband.

There is literature about drug use, including "Memoirs of an Addicted Brain" by neuroscientist Marc Lewis about his personal experiences. There are also memoirs of violence. The teenage prostitute Amy Fisher, after shooting her pimp's wife in the face, published "Amy Fisher: My Story" in 1993 and "If I Knew Then" in 2004. O. J. Simpson, over a decade after being acquitted of murdering his wife, wrote a book with the hypothetical title called "If I Did It"; his wife's family acquired the rights to the book and repackaged it with the word "if" in relatively tiny font so that it appears to be "I Did It: Confessions of the Killer."

Billions of 'overshares'

You don't have to be a celebrity, scholar or professional writer to air your laundry. In "Your life torn open," (Wired, Feb. 3, 2011), Andrew Keen says that today's social media is "fuelled by our billions of confessional tweets and narcissistic updates." In contrast, he highlights a 17th-century painting by Jan Vermeer, “The Woman in Blue Reading a Letter,” which for him evokes a moment of “social invisibility” and reminds him of “the history of privacy.” 

Keen believes that the increasing use of social media to share everything is "a trap" that "is rooted in a misunderstanding of the human condition," as he believes that human happiness comes from aloneness rather than togetherness. This claim is surely overstated; individual personalities differ in their preferences for socialization and solitude (see Anneli Rufus’ "Party of One: The Loners’ Manifesto"), and such preferences are also culturally influenced (see Gish Jen’s "Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self"). Despite the overstatement that humans fundamentally prefer to be asocial, the observation that people may trap themselves by entirely abandoning notions of privacy is probably correct.

Where is dignity: In privacy or in accountability?

In 2003, Anita Allen published an article in the Alabama Law Review called "Privacy Isn't Everything: Accountability as a Personal and Social Good." She set up "privacy" and "accountability" at opposite ends of a spectrum and argued that, while they are both valuable, there is some overlap in the situations where they apply. For example, child-rearing is an area of life in which parents want privacy to make their own choices but about which some public accountability is also necessary for the sake of the child's welfare.

Allen was writing at a formative historical moment with respect to this philosophical question. She was able to recognize that the United States was entering "an era of increased surveillance and security" following Sept. 11, 2001, but Facebook had not been founded yet and blogs were only just bursting into popularity, and therefore much of what we know as the "social" Internet today did not yet exist to buttress this surveillance.

Allen observed that both privacy and accountability are related to dignity. With regard to privacy, "intimate relations, sex, health, and personal finances still merit a privileged status," yet at the same time, "the fact that we expect accountability of fellow humans is a measure of the seriousness with which we regard them." Additionally, because decisions about when to deliberately ignore someone's behavior and when to meddle in their affairs are heavily influenced by power dynamics such as race and class, those decisions demand careful attention.

The ideas in Allen's paper can inform a discussion about confessional memoirs by making one more hesitant to assume that privacy is always the more dignified choice. Some people write memoirs as a way of holding themselves and others accountable for their actions, and they may perceive that this dignifies their lives because it recognizes that their actions have consequences and that it dignifies the lives of others who may have been hurt or affected.

Too much accountability: Can it backfire?

In the same article mentioned earlier, Julia Baird wrote:

"In our narrative of the feisty, spurned woman, the private, silent stance of wives like Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Silda Spitzer seems archaic. The advice these women would once have given - 'Don't air your dirty laundry in public' - now seems quaint, a relic of an era when people thought pain was a private emotion."

Feminists in the 20th century argued that "the personal is political," and Americans increasingly began to speak out about marital infidelities. However, Baird questions whether the confessional memoir might "deepen and extend your pain," especially in light of a 2000 study that indicated that counseling for grief may sometimes be counterproductive insofar as it can prolong the grieving process.

The role of confessional literature

Readers are drawn to embarrassing, true life "tell-alls" for a variety of reasons. Gossip is a staple of human society. Confessions of wrongdoing can be as exciting as the "true crime" genre. People who have survived a difficult situation (or who witness someone they care about going through a tough time) often appreciate gaining perspective by reading about someone else who has gone through a similar strait. And devoted fans are interested in everything celebrities do, whether it is of consequence or not.

So, there will always be a continued role for such memoirs, but their popularity, their perceived uniqueness and their capacity to shock will change over time, depending in large part on how they complement the Internet's "social" culture.

Originally posted to Helium Network on April 9, 2014.

Image: Painting by Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) © public domain Wikimedia Commons.

"“I like the definition of privacy from the Cypherpunk Manifesto: ‘Privacy is the power to selectively reveal yourself,’” Harvey said, referring to technologist and cryptographer Eric Hughes’ 1993 call for encrypted information systems. “By allowing other people to collect, watch or monitor you... It's a power dynamic that puts you on the losing end. It's really about power and individual agency, but there's also a destructive political and democratic component to allowing these mass surveillance systems to grow even larger.”"
— Samantha Cole, The State of Anti-Surveillance Design, 404 Media, Jan 5, 2026

How many Americans believe the Bible is the 'Word of God'?

Over the years, Gallup has asked Americans if they believed the Bible was the "actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word." In 1977, 38 percent of Americans identified themselves as Biblical literalists – rejecting the poll's other options that the Bible is "the inspired word of God" or "an ancient book of fables" – but by 2011 this response had declined to 30 percent. The decline was not perfectly linear. The number of Biblical literalists increased to about 40 percent in the early 1980s and declined to a low of 27 percent in 2001 before rising slightly again.

Gallup found that Biblical literalists were more likely to claim that they were Protestant Christians, attended church weekly, were political conservatives and/or Republicans, had only a high school education or less, and had low incomes. Additionally, Rasmussen found in 2005 that they are slightly more likely to be female and over 40.  (Among atheists and agnostics, by contrast, men clearly outnumber women two-to-one, according to the Pew Religious Landscape Study in 2008.)

When Americans are asked in a general way if they will affirm the truth of the Bible, the majority do so. Rasmussen found in 2005 that 63 percent of Americans agreed that "the Bible" – without having been asked to limit their response to specific stories within the Bible – was "literally true." This figure is twice as high as Gallup's.

Of course, it is possible to believe that some, and not all, statements in the Bible are true. When people are given options to declare belief in specific parts of the Bible, it generates a more nuanced picture of belief. ABC News Primetime poll in 2004 found that over 60 percent of Americans were literalists about certain Biblical events such as the creation of the world, Noah's ark, and Moses parting the Red Sea.  Those who described themselves as "evangelical Protestants" were more likely than other Protestants to have these literalist beliefs. A CBS news poll later that year found similar results, with 55 percent claiming to believe in the creation of the world as described in the Bible. Yet another poll found that 40 percent believed that God created humans "pretty much in their present form" several thousand years ago (Gallup, 2010).

William Saletan argued for Slate that, while Gallup has found in a dozen polls between 1982-2014 that at least 40 percent of Americans claim to believe that God created the Earth less than 10,000 years ago, a new 2014 study by the BioLogos Foundation found that, when people are pressed to be more specific about their beliefs and allowed to express uncertainty, only 15 percent of Americans maintained such a position.

Americans' beliefs differ so widely by geography such that it is hard to generalize about what Americans believe. In the U.S. states of Alabama and Arkansas, 75 percent believe the Bible is literally true, while in Vermont and Massachusetts it is only 22 percent (Rasmussen, 2006).

While 92 percent say they believe in God, only 71 percent say they are "absolutely certain" of God's existence. A quarter of Americans believe God is an "impersonal force." (Pew, 2008)

Polls have returned an assortment of more dramatic, specific beliefs. Over three-quarters of Americans believe in angels. (Scripps Howard / Ohio University, 2001) From 1975 to 1995, 140 children died of curable diseases in the United States after their parents refused medical treatment for religious reasons.  A Pew survey in 2006 found that a third of black Protestants and a third of white evangelicals believe that the "Second Coming" (the return of Jesus to Earth) will occur during their lifetimes.

And although nearly a quarter of Americans don't expect to have a religious funeral (American Religious Identification Survey, 2008), nearly half of Americans said they would disapprove of their child marrying an atheist (University of Minnesota Study, 2008) and 60 percent think the nation benefits when politicians make public expressions of faith (Newsweek, 2002).

Update: In 2020, a third of self-identified evangelicals in the United States agreed with a statement that Jesus was a good teacher, but not God. (The study from Ligonier Ministries was conducted by LifeWay Research.) In addition, two-thirds agreed that Jesus "is the first and greatest being created by God." Both of these positions are inconsistent with "evangelical teaching and most historic Christian doctrine," according to Relevant Magazine.

This article was originally posted to Helium Network on July 30, 2011.

George W. Bush's memoir on Sept. 11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq

"Decision Points" covers a range of issues that defined the presidency of George W. Bush. These are the memoirs of an American president. This article was originally published to Helium Network on Nov. 15, 2010. Photo: Televised phone conversation from the Oval Office in the White House in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 13, 2001. White House photo by Eric Draper. Public domain. Wikimedia Commons.

"Decision Points," released in November 2010, is the long-awaited memoir from former U.S. President George W. Bush about his eventful eight years in office. He describes his experience leading the country during the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the subsequent U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and the financial crisis.

Rather than opening the book with these weighty issues, Bush begins with personal vignettes about the childhood death of his sister Robin, his struggles in school, his decision to quit drinking, his interest in the preacher Billy Graham, his reluctance as a young man to settle down with a career and family, and his intention to adopt children with his wife before she unexpectedly became pregnant with twins. Following the personal introduction, the rest of the book is organized around political issues. There are separate chapters for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Even those stories are not always told in chronological order, but are often framed instead by descriptions of Bush's relationships with other key political figures. The sentence structure and vocabulary is extremely simple; portions of the book could be assigned to a bright sixth-grader.

Part of the drive behind this book may have come from Bush's desire to correct the record when, in April 2004, a journalist asked him to name a mistake he had made and he could not. This memoir is a little more open about some of his shortcomings.

Sept. 11 and the war in Afghanistan

Of the suicide bombings of Sept. 11, 2001 and the U.S. response to them, Bush writes: "The story of that week is the key to understanding my presidency." The event led directly to the war in Afghanistan. Bush asked the ruling Taliban in Afghanistan to cooperate with his investigation into and response to the attacks, but they refused. So, less than a month after the terrorist attacks, Operation Enduring Freedom was launched. "The liberation of Afghanistan had begun," as he puts it. The plan was for the US to join local opposition to "avoid looking like a conqueror or occupier. America would help the Afghan people liberate themselves."

Bush defends the practices of waterboarding of suspected terrorists (an "enhanced interrogation" technique that many described as torture) and wiretapping under the Terrorist Surveillance Program (something else no one wants to happen to them).

Not finding Osama Bin Laden, the man responsible for organizing the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, was one of Bush's "great regrets." (Bin Laden was killed a few months after the release of Bush's memoirs, under Obama's presidency.) But at least, Bush says, Bin Laden never attacked the US again. That the US did not again suffer any significant international terrorist attack for the remainder of his term is, to his mind, "my most meaningful accomplishment as president."

The war in Iraq

Bush recalls that France, Germany and Russia stood together in refusing to help the US invade Iraq. "I understood why people might disagree on the threat Saddam Hussein posed to the United States," Bush says. "But I didn't see how anyone could deny that liberating Iraq advanced the cause of human rights." The opening "shock and awe" bombing campaign of government buildings began on March 19, 2003, and by that fall, 30 other countries had ground forces in Iraq.

Bush admits that "we had not adequately prepared" for the scenario of Baghdad being taken by looting and violence. Saddam released tens of thousands of criminals from jail prior to the arrival of the U.S. forces, and to make things worse, the Iraqi police "collapsed" and the army "melted away". Later, the American man in charge of post-liberation organization "formally disbanded the Iraqi army, which had largely disappeared on its own," and Bush did not anticipate that these armed men would join the insurgency rather than signing up for the new army. The Sunnis in particular feared they would not have a place in the new Iraq. As a result, Bush wonders whether his de-Baathification program was too severe. 

He reveals that the scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in 2004, in which U.S. soldiers photographed themselves abusing Iraqi prisoners, was "a low point of my presidency," but he doesn't elaborate what corrective action needed to be taken.

Of the ultimate discovery that Saddam Hussein had not been hiding the weapons of mass destruction that were the original basis of the invasion, Bush said, "No one was more shocked or angry than I was when we didn't find the weapons. I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do." For someone who is shocked and angry, Bush devotes a surprisingly small space in this book to the vindictive outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame after her husband questioned the accuracy of the "16 words" claim in Bush's 2003 State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Bush does not mention the name of former White House press secretary Scott McClellan, whose 2008 tell-all memoir "What Happened" alleges that Bush "deceived" him in asking him to assure the press - inaccurately, in hindsight - that Scooter Libby was not involved in the leak.

After Saddam was captured, he explained that he'd inflated the appearance of his weapons capability as a bluff because he wanted to make a show of strength to Iran and because he did not believe the US would really invade. If Saddam indeed received "mixed signals" about the seriousness of Bush's intent, Bush blames it on the joint statement issued by France, Germany and Russia that they would not participate in the invasion and - rather noncommittally and gratuitously - on "antiwar demonstrators around the world" whose actions "didn't help," whatever that might mean. (One imagines that those critics could have proved very useful indeed, had Bush listened to some of their arguments.).

Hurricane Katrina

When Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana in 2005, the city of New Orleans flooded and was plunged into chaos. Bush says he didn't immediately recognize that local authorities were failing to lead, and he acknowledges that "I took too long to decide" when assuming federal control of the situation in New Orleans. He says he should have appeared on the scene more rapidly and communicated more empathy. "My biggest substantive mistake," he clarifies, "was waiting too long to deploy active-duty troops." Being accused of racism in the response to Katrina was "the worst moment of my presidency."

Financial crisis

As Bush neared the end of his presidency, a crisis hit financial markets, severe enough that they "ceased to function," as Bush put it. He says it was unfair to use taxpayer money to fix problems that the banks had caused, but it would have more unfair to do nothing and to let Americans suffer enormous economic problems caused by multiple bank failures. Bush was involved in September 2008 when the government chose to allow Lehman Brothers to fail but purchased most of insurance giant AIG which was $85 billion in debt and put government-sponsored mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into conservatorship. He supported the Troubled Asset Relief Program to help fix the problem. Additionally, in "Decision Points, he takes both credit and blame for the "bailout" of the automakers that is often pinned on his successor, Barack Obama.

Additional topics

Bush covers many other topics, including:

• Why, as a tactical political maneuver, he ought to have revealed his previous arrest for drunk driving early in the first presidential campaign, to avoid suffering when it was revealed shortly before the election
• How he became the first president to fund embryonic stem cell research, but for existing lines only
• The mandate that insurance companies cover treatment for mental illness
• The passage of the PATRIOT Act
• The implementation of No Child Left Behind education reform, which he considers to be "civil rights legislation"
• How the "roadmap" to the establishment of a Palestinian state essentially failed when Israel invaded Lebanon
• The success of PEPFAR, in which the US pledged a total of $45 billion over 10 years to combat HIV/AIDS in Africa, and concurrent programs against malaria in Africa
• The withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in favor of establishing a missile defense system, and the Moscow Treaty in which the US and Russia pledged to eliminate thousands of nuclear warheads by 2012
• The failure to reform Social Security, which he describes as "one of the greatest disappointments of my presidency"

There are also some curious omissions, such as energy policy, climate change and the popular debate over same-sex marriage.

While Bush doesn't spend much time analyzing Democrats, a pleasing feature is that he doesn't spend much time attacking them, either, and his criticism is muted and civil. It is more bothersome that he gives scant attention to the opinions and experiences of the American population at large. In the book, Americans serve as occasional statistics on education and Medicare and as symbols of the effects of 9/11 and the subsequent wars, but they never appear as experts who provide competing worldviews. Because of that, this hefty book is limited to Bush's own personal narrative, and it doesn't tell the larger story of the country during the Bush administration. It leaves the reader with the impression that Bush didn't accept much advice or insight from anyone outside his inner circle.

Although this book does not contain surprising revelations, it is worthwhile for those who are interested in a story of the eight years of the Bush administration narrated from the perspective of the President.

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Related Link

"Afghan contractors: 'I wish I'd never worked for the UK government'," Yogita Limaye, BBC, 16 Aug 2022